The Capitalist Cookbook

The pimple-faced teenager who looks like Ron Weasley in a clown wig and who works part-time behind the library check-out counter grins at me when I slide my return over to him, a slim 248-page paperback of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. He winks and sez: wanna see something?

He shuffles to a room behind the desk and comes out with a bundle of papers. When he plops it down I flip through it:

Chapter One: Drugs. Chapter Two: Electronics, Sabotage, and Surveillance. Chapter Three: Natural, Nonlethal, and Lethal Weapons. Chapter Four: Explosives and Booby Traps.

“This is the Anarchist Cookbook.”

“Yup. I figure since you clearly had an interest in reading Sam Greenlee’s bare-bones how-to guide on urban guerilla warfare wrapped up in the guise of fiction, William Powell’s step-by-step guide on the tools of the trade might be the next logical step. I mean, if you’re interested.”

I tap the bundle of xeroxed papers.

“We have a copy in the library, but between you and me, it’s one of those books that if you check it out, red flags go off and they put you on a list and keep an eye on you.”

“I don’ think they do that, anymore.”

“Pfft. Ya really think that? That’s why I xeroxed the whole thing and loan people this copy off the record.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I believe in spreading the knowledge. Y’know, Ted Kaczynski once almost obliterated an entire Boeing 747 mid-flight - Know where he got the know-how to build that bomb?”

He taps the top page.

I strip down to my skivvies and snap on a pair of yellow rubber gloves. The book doesn’t say to do that, but I figure since we’re cooking, might as well cook like Walter White.

Three Carbon atoms, five Hydrogen, three Nitrogen, and nine Oxygen atoms, all carefully balanced together. That makes Nitroglycerin.

On step four, I pour more ice cubes into the tub. Way more. If the temperature starts climbing north of 30 degrees celsius – that’s 86 Farenheit in the normal English-speaking world - I’m fucked.

I carefully read the manual, but still got it open to page 113 on the toilet lid next to me just in case.

I squeeze a medicine dropper over the 75-millimeter beaker sticking up out of the below-freezing tap water, filled to the 13-millimeter mark with fuming red nitric acid. 98 percent concentration, naturally. Drip. Drip. Drip. Slowly and carefully, until the entire surface of the acid is covered in glycerin. As soon as that first hit of glycerin hits, the temperature in the beaker starts to rise. I steal myself and get ready to dump the entire solution out the beaker and into the ice-bath itself.

Nothing. I stir the cocktail gently for ten minutes. That reminds me of an anecdote: this guy falls off a high-rise and on his way down, as he passes each floor, he thinks to himself: So far, so good. 

After nitration I get another beaker of water. Once the solution has settled to the bottom, I drain the rest away. Then plop what’s left into a bicarbonate solution – “sodium bicarbonate is an alkali which will neutralize most a the acid remaining.” 

Now, the moment a truth: a drop a nitroglycerin on a metal plate and ignite.  

William Powell writes: “If it is true Nitroglycerin, it will burn with a clear blue flame.”   

After I violate something warm and living, I tuck myself back into my Levi’s and go upstairs. Lighting a cig as I flop down on top a my sheets, I reach over and grab the book off the nightstand.

The copy that ginger god-send lent me has this preface that starts off with a couple a quotes. Here’s the first:

“We live in an age of anarchy both abroad and at home.”

Nixon, baby, you fucking wish.

Here’s the second:

“Confronted with a choice, the American people would choose the policeman’s truncheon over the anarchist’s bomb.”

Sad, but too true, Agnew.

There’s this movie I saw once. Called ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ Towards the start, there’s this scene where Willem DaFoe is holed up in a desert warehouse manufacturing counterfeit bills. The movie shows you the step-by-step process as it follows along - though of course such primitive methods from a much simpler time wouldn’t fly today. Bit of trivia: they actually did it. When filming the movie, they actually did just that – manufactured bullshit bills. What you see in the movie, that’s for real. Afterward, William Friedkin even swiped some a those bills from the set and got away with paying for shit with those fake-ass slips of paper. And the whole time they were shooting that scene – took ’em a couple days – every time a helicopter happened to fly over the set – they really did film in an aluminum shack in the desert out in the middle a nowhere – the whole film crew would tense up, thinking it was the feds come to cleave they asses with the long dick of the law.

Why am I saying all this? Standing at the kitchen counter, the cookbook cracked open to a diagram on page 54, pouring over a glass flask with a plastic funnel and rubber hose protruding out of it, making homemade DMT, I feel the same way that camera crew must’ve felt. Afterward I test the resulting powder by mixing it in with cat food and leaving it out for the neighborhood strays.

Another day, I fetch the nitroglycerin and mix it in with a small amount of nitrated sawdust, the amount of which has to be smaller than the nitroglycerin, according to the book.

“A person attempting to make this should use 92 percent nitroglycerin and 8 percent nitrocellulose (that’s the sawdust) and pray”. As the now plastic substance stiffens, I’m praying twice as hard ‘cause I kinda just eyed it and don’t fuckin’ know if I got the ratio right. The whole time all I can think is how Josef Terboven went down into that bunker and blew himself up with 50 kg of dynamite when Germany surrendered in 1945.

This is how we get blasting gelatin, and this is what made Alfred Nobel stupid fucking rich.

At this point, someone sensible would tell me to stop. But what am I gonna do? Not make plastic explosives? Not capitalize on global terrorism? You want conformity? Cause that’s how you get conformity.

I rummage around the attic and pull out what I’m lookin’ for. In the kitchen I break open a thermometer, measuring out 5 grams of mercury. Careful, I pour it in with 35 milliliters nitric acid. This is all on page 114. The solution heats up. When it bubbles and turns green you know the mercury is dissolved. I strap on a mask with a filter and pour slowly into a small flask of ethyl alcohol, as per instruction. Just as the book warned, red fumes steam up. A half hour later I come back and sure ’nough the red fume’s turned white. Add water to the distilled solution. Filter, and extract the small white crystals that have formed. What we have here is pure fuckin’ mercury fulminate and should be washed many times. Test regularly with litmus paper for any remaining unwanted acid.

Science bitch. 

A xerox of a xerox. I copy the pages I need and return the book. The librarian eyes us suspiciously when I pass it over the counter but doesn’t say anything,, most likely assuming it’s just Carrot Top’s homework. Grease-flesh Ron Howard winks at me conspiratorially.

Mix some plastique. They will come. If you give them silencers, they will come. If you offer them DMT (That’s C12 H16 N2 for all you nerds), they will partake. If you shake a few tabs of acid (C20 H25 N3 O), you best believe they will drop it. Sure, I can throw cash in your face and offer a pithy remark on how anarchy is capitalism’s favorite customer. Or you can give me five bucks and I’ll show you how you can use a 12 Gauge as a molotov launcher (page 98). 

Maybe it betrays the spirit of revolution William Powell no doubt had in mind when he wrote it, But what are we gonna do? Venerate Marx and sing fuckin’ Kum Ba Yah? If I can sell tear gas made in someone’s basement to one side, and suicide vests weighed with plastique packed in someone’s kitchen to the other, I figure –

why not?